Playing fast and loose with democracy

Joseph’s promised us a refund.

Joseph Muscat has said that even if his political party loses its law suit against the government for the return of VAT paid on car registration tax, when he is prime minister he will ignore the court’s ruling and hand the money out all the same.

Was I the only one who shuddered? I grew up in a country where two successive Labour prime ministers showed the utmost contempt for the law and for the rulings of the courts. Mintoff made it his business to kick the courts about and to systematically dismantle or undermine the various institutions which shored up democracy. As for the Labour prime minister who succeeded him, his still-faithful acolyte Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, none of those of us who read it can ever forget the interview he gave to an important London broadsheet, carefully explaining, in response to a question about the internal assaults on our country’s democracy, that Malta doesn’t need law courts. They are unnecessary, he said, because it is the people who decide, and so we need nothing more than “the people’s courts”. It was strange to see people who should know better, like those who got caught up in their support for the organisation Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar, express near-identical sentiments only a few weeks ago. It is immediately obvious that Joseph Muscat is capitalising on the growing and entirely misplaced belief that institutions and democratic processes are unnecessary and that they can and should be substituted by something intangible called the will of the people.

Somebody should remind him – though I suspect he never knew it in the first place, given the great number of lacunae in his education – that these institutions and processes are there to protect us not so much from the capricious vagaries of rulers, but from that very will of the people. It was the will of the people, rather than the mad excesses of their rulers, which brought to pass some of the most terrible episodes in human history. The will of the people, when not kept in check by democratic institutions and democratic processes, is essentially selfish and governed by tunnel-vision, unable to see the wider picture and with a strong propensity to round on other people whose will is considered of less significance, or who are outnumbered.

When a man who is trying to become prime minister promises to ignore the ruling of the courts and do what he wants to do regardless of that judgement, you can conclude that he has the same contempt for democratic institutions and processes as did his party predecessors, or that he believes such institutions and processes to be dispensable if they do not fit in with his plans and objectives. I am not surprised to hear him say that he will ignore the judgement of the courts if it is not to his liking. This is the same man who ignored the vote of ‘the people’ in favour of European Union membership, because it was not the result for which he had campaigned relentlessly. It took him five years of hindsight to acknowledge that the Yes vote won the referendum, and he wasn’t too embarrassed to admit it.

10 steps forwards, nine steps back

There are so many flaws in Muscat’s reasoning that it makes me want to weep at the thought that, whenever we’re taking 10 steps forwards, some crass inadequate that the Labour Party has decided to choose as its leader is invariably waiting in the wings to push us nine steps back. This is the story of Malta post 1970.

If Muscat has it in mind to ignore the ruling of the courts, then why did he go to court in the first place? If he can promise to hand out the money in violation of a court ruling, then he might as well have promised to hand out the money in the absence of any court ruling whatsoever. There’s another point: a man who ignored a referendum vote that didn’t go his way and who promises to ignore a court judgement that doesn’t go his way will think nothing of using the same approach in other situations. That approach, you might have failed to notice, is quintessentially and fundamentally undemocratic.

What Muscat is saying here, with the cynicism of somebody brought up to admire great democrats like Dom Mintoff, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant, is that democracy is there to suit his purposes. If it doesn’t suit his purposes, he will ignore or undermine it. If he says he will ignore the court’s ruling if it doesn’t go his way, then that’s a double-edged sword, too: he can just as easily ignore the court if it rules, post 2013 when he is prime minister, that the government must pay the money back. By then, it will be his responsibility to ‘find’ €50 million, and he will have changed his mind.

Muscat has serious problems with democracy, but more serious still is his inability to grasp how money works. “Just as the government found €80 million to build the opera house site, so it should find €50 million to repay the people what is rightfully theirs,” he told the assembled throng of bargain-hunters outside Labour’s headquarters. He seemed excited at the thought of 17,000 people queuing on the off-chance that they might get a few hundred euros in several years’ time. He wouldn’t have been astonished if he had, like me, seen thousands of women queuing with carrier-bags full of tin-can lids and empty plastic bottles, in Freedom Square, waiting to exchange them for a mug or a dishcloth with a brand-name printed on it. That’s the way this country works: the dole (as in hand-outs) queue and the Victory kitchen are imprinted on its collective memory. The kind of mentality that drove thousands of people to stand in that queue for hours just on the vague off-chance that someday they might get some money can be read from the contents of the donation-box that Labour put up in its front room: €8,000 donated by 17,000 people. In other words, all they gave in exchange for the promised return of their money was a few cents each.

The magic money-box

The government hasn’t ‘found’ €80 million for the opera house site. On the other hand, when a church-state foundation found €14 million from European Union sources for another project, Muscat bent over backwards to sabotage it. Governments don’t ‘find’ money, and Muscat, as future prime minister, had better learn this fast. There are no money-trees. The only money government has comes from taxes. So if the government is going to ‘find’ €50 million to shell out to people who bought cars in the last five years, then to do so it is going to have to find a new way of raising taxes off the backs of all those of us who haven’t bought cars since 2004.

Those of us who are not a party to the law suit, who haven’t bought cars, and who just have nothing to do with this business at all, will have to fork out the money. And if those who have bought a car since 2004 remark that taxes are levied across the board and that they will have to pay those increased taxes too, then I have to ask them why they’re bothering to claim money that will only result in them paying more money: the government taking with one hand and handing out with the other. After all, when they bought those cars they knew the tax structure involved and they still went ahead and made the purchase. They weren’t conned.

When a future prime minister stands in front of a queue of bargain-hunters and claims that the government can ‘find’ €50 million if it wants to, we must ask whether he has lost his marbles or whether he is heading down the Alfred Sant route after claiming to be a human earthquake of change. Maybe he imagines that Lawrence Gonzi will go over to that nice dresser in his office, pull out il-kaxxa ta’ Malta and say, “Oh, look, I just happen to have that €50 million tucked away here.” Over the years, I have had trouble working out whether Labour leaders actually reason in this imbecilic fashion, or whether they are playing cynically to the imbecilic reasoning of ‘the people’.

The IQ of a wombat

There was more nonsense. Now is the “ideal” time for the government to pay out this money, Muscat said, because of the “delicate” economic situation. Oh really? And where is the government going to get the money from, before it can hand it out? There is only one answer: by doing things to make the delicate economic situation worse. Joseph Muscat reasons like somebody with the intellectual quotient of a wombat: one day he raises hell about the utility tariffs, the next day he tells the government to raise taxes by €50 million in a year, or cut planned expenditure by €50 million over the same period, so as to ‘find’ the money to give to the people.

I’m not going to enter the debate as to whether the government is legally or morally obliged to pay this money or not. I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the matter to form an educated opinion, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Would that others in positions far more prominent than mine adopt the same stance instead of shooting their mouths off with promises on which they can’t deliver. All I can see is that Labour wasn’t even competent to assess whether it could file a class action suit because it brought 17,000 people queuing to its door with the promise that it would do so. And only later, it found out that it couldn’t.

Despite the fact that its two deputy leaders are lawyers and there are lawyers pouring out of every pore at the party headquarters, not one of those lawyers knew that class action suits are not contemplated in Maltese law, and that every one of those 17,000 people whose signature and 50 cents Joseph Muscat took is going to have to pay his or her own considerable court fees, failing which the Labour Party is going to have to keep its word and shell out the estimated €1 million itself.

The sheer incompetence of the Labour Party has by 2009 reached legendary proportions. The way Muscat has started out, it looks like he’ll be extending that reputation for ‘act first, think later’ to an even more risible degree.